|
 moby puts out something that doesn't suck! and at a good price!
by mark
 i was in my local record/cd/etc. store the other day (last tuesday, actually) nosing around trying to come up with some stuff to get for some people and kill some time and all that fun shit, when i realized the new moby cd + dvd came out that day. so i look around the dvd section and don't see it, and look for the new releases section, but everything seems to get moved every month so i wasn't sure where the fuck it was, so i head over to the electronica section. and there in the moby sub-section (oh, did i mention i've got my own sub-section there with a little section card that says "phonicoid" on it? yeah, i feel special) is the cd "18 b sides" which comes with "18 dvd". and it's $12. pretty impressive, seeing as how it costs 2 or 3 times that much over in europe (where it's the dvd plus the cd, instead of the d plus the dvd, go figgure).
so let me start off by saying that one of my favourite songs moby did in the recent album's sessions was a b-side on the first single (the "we are all made of stars" single), which is "landing" featuring azure ray. this kicks off the b-sides cd and is followed up by a variety of less noteworthy b-sides (and an extra or two) that still aren't too bad, some fairly decent.
and then there's the dvd. finally he's starting to do right by us. we get the videos from the recent album (tho not quite all, there was a cut of "we are all made of stars" for one of the remixes that didn't turn up on it, i'm sad to say) we get behind the scenes/making of type stuff regarding the videos, we get moby trying to be funny (and sometimes succeding) by being little characters and doing little joke shorts and whatnot. okay, so far this is kinda like the previous dvd.
and we get an audio megamix of remixes (many of them kinda dull) from singles like on the dvd for play.
and we get live footage, like the last dvd.
but it starts to change there... this time, instead of being a couple songs from a live performance on a tv show in the uk we get a concert. and not just any concert, glastonbury 2003 where (if memory serves) he closed for the festival, and with a cover of radiohead's "creep" no less. now we're talking.
okay, so he's at this point done a good job and made us fans and collectors happy, twice the dvd for nearly half the price of the last one, and with a cd of b-sides to boot.
so does he stop there?
no!
here's the really good part.
"outtakes and bonus songs".
demos and unreleased tracks from sessions for the past couple albums.
sure this means tons of collectors now have a few of the uber-rare tracks that i and maybe 3 other collectors had, but it's not like we don't have more where those came from (i've got the original demo tape for play, which still has some great stuff that wasn't put on here), and it's nice to have sharper copies of those that made it on here. so yeah, 90 minutes of previously unreleased music.
and then there's even more random stuff like photos moby's taken over the past couple years, but that doesn't matter nearly as much.
so what am i saying here?
i'm saying that this is a worthwhile purchase for anyone who's even remotely into moby (and prolly a lot of people who aren't), and it's about time something like this was put out. moby keeps talking about his "thousands of unreleased track" (i'd be willing to bet most of them sound the same as a dozen others in that pile, but nonetheless...).
so yeah, good job moby.
if his upcoming album "baby monkey" under the name voodoo child doesn't suck, it might actually indicate a legitimate upswing, which would be very nice to see.
oh yeah, and his track on the new briteny spears album actually isn't too bad either. (it's a strange world, isn't it?)
-mark
|
